Having Fun, With Intentionality . . .

This past weekend, Andrew and Amy came to visit. Saturday, Sherry, Chris and Sam came down and we all hung out, played games, and ate together. It was just wonderful. Sometime on Sunday, Joe pointed out that we don't have many weekends like that. Of course we don't have many weekends with four of our six together with us at the same time. But I think what Joe meant was that we don't have very many relaxed weekends, where we spend more time doing what we WANT to do than what we NEED to do.
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The stuff we NEED to do will ultimately get done.
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It was awfully nice to just lounge around with the kids, play with Sam, cook together, read, and enjoy each others' company for the better part of two days.
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A couple of weeks ago Joe and I went up to Doylestown to a photography exhibit and then to dinner. Not a particularly fancy place, but a nice place. Again, we had that feeling of "we don't do this kind of thing enough." He has a little list of places he'd like to go locally. I want to pay more attention to that list.
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Coincident with this, I was reading Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking which she wrote the year her husband died. It made quite an impact, this short little book did. One of the themes in it was her husband's having mentioned that they didn't do enough deliberately fun things. Now this seemed a little bit of an odd comment thrown in with descriptions of their life of privilege, visits with Julia Child, jetting off to Paris, cooking with Katherine Ross, etc. But this was something that was important enough to John for him to mention it to her, and for her to remember.
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Over the past year, the year of two weddings, a baby, and a gallbladder, my life has changed a lot, all in ways for the better. We now have six kids, rather than three, plus Sam. It is harder than ever to coordinate schedules so that many of us can be together at one time. This is a priority now, and it needs to be acknowledged as such, and made intentional.
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I don't want to look at the calendar to see when we can do stuff together and find that so many dates are full already. I want it to be easy for Joe and me to drop everything to be with them.
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"We don't do enough fun things" was a bit of a mini-epiphany for me. We do fun things, and we should do more of them. We should have space available for them.
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This morning I wrote a letter of resignation from a group that I've been involved with for about eight or nine years. I'd been feeling less passionate about the group for a little while, but just couldn't make the break. Letting go of this group to free up more time for fun things was the right thing to do, and once I did it, I felt relieved.
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I'd also put myself under some pressure to get a quilt made for a friend's upcoming birthday. Getting it finished and off to the machine quilter and back and bound in the space of just a couple of weeks was POSSIBLE and I was convinced that I could and should do it.
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But making a quilt is something I do for fun. And I don't like to do it under pressure. And so yesterday I decided to show the quilt in whatever stage it is to my friend on his birthday with the promise to have it to him before cold weather sets in and he will need it. Again, I felt freed by this decision.
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Tonight is dinner and symphony orchestra with Maggie and Frank, one of the "funnest" things we do. There have been weeks when life has been so busy that going to the orchestra morphed from something we wanted to do into something we had to do.
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Not this time!